Steve

“Democracy is a stupid idea anyway!”
“We agree. It’s demagogue-prone. That’s a disease to which electoral systems are vulnerable. Yet demagogues are easy to identify. They gesture a lot and speak with pulpit rhythms, using words that ring of religious fervor and god-fearing sincerity. Sincerity with nothing behind it takes so much practice, Dama. The practice can always be detected.”
"By Truthsayers?"
"By anyone who learns the signs: Repetition. Great attempts to keep your attention on words. You must pay no attention to words. Watch what the person does. That way you learn the motives.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep out change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. “I already know the important things!” we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away. —THE ZENSUFI MASTER”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune